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Tore mahhass when ah raised mah right hand.” Adjusting the collar of his field jacket against the freezing drip from his helmet, he calmly curved around the speechless redneck and headed for the war… still dragging Uncle Sam’s property through the mud.

In 1945 everyone thought that peace really meant peace. Everyone, that is, who didn’t live in a ghetto, where peace means burial parlor. Newspapers were amazingly vague about the wave of lynchings sweeping the South. Reporters and police authorities seemed mystified by the number of burned, black corpses hanging in some of the choicest wooded areas, many of them castrated. The supposition was that they were put there by “anonymous persons.” Even more mystifying was the fact that they were usually veterans. Dabney, the enigmatic chef behind the soul food counter at the Harlem Moon observed that, “What you all have went and did is upset the white folks.” Hell, here we go again. In spite of all that fightinfugginaanfootracing in North Africa and Italy and in the Pacific, in spite of all that praying that Walter’s family had been doing down in Baltimore, Charlie was upset one more time.  It’s no wonder that one of Dabney’s customers had rudely said: “Well FUCK Charlie! And fuck you too, Dabney!”

Now although one was inclined to sympathize with the irate customer’s sentiments Dabney did have a point. Charlie was upset again and what seems to have upset him was the fact that Sam had trained two million black youths in the maintenance, handling and angry use of Charlie’s most dependable guarantor of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for some of the people all of the time. Sam himself had diligently trained Black youngsters to use rifles, machine-guns and flamethrowers.  Some had even flown fighter planes and bombing planes. But what really bugged the judges, sheriffs and southern senators was that these Black soldiers had aimed their contrivances with evil intent at white men! Sure, perhaps there were SS mean who’d bashed the pulsating brains out of Jewish infants, or panzer troops who’d mowed down swarms of chained Slovaks. But what mattered most was that these Blacks had killed white men. And to the traditional American way of viewing these things, “Any god damned nigger who raises even a hand against a white man is attempting to overthrow decency-and government- by force and violence.” In 1946, 1947, 1948, the “silent majority” was surprisingly loquacious and the word was “put the Blacks in their places.” There may just have been some connection between this slogan and the growing number of “anonymously lynched.”